George Herbert’s ‘The Forerunners’ and Love’s Labour’s Lost

When Berowne gives up literary language at Rosaline’s request, he does so with a flourish which she promptly corrects. He renounces As many critics have dryly noted, Herbert repeatedly does the same (for instance, in ‘A Wreath’, ‘A true Hymne’, both ‘Jordan’ poems, and ‘The Quidditie’), richly detailing how he must become honest about his ‘course-spunne lines’, and leave off ‘quaint words, and trim invention’, ‘Curling with metaphors a plaine intention,/Decking the sense’, finding ‘Nothing could seem too rich to clothe the sunne’. ‘The Forerunners’ bids a lengthy ‘Farewell to sweet phrases’ largely through the image of clothing, boasting of how he brought his metaphors ‘to Church well drest and clad’, which now might return to ‘soil their broider’d coat’, admonishing them to ‘Let foolish lovers, if they will love dung,/With canvas, not with arras, clothe their shame’. Herbert’s editor, Helen Wilcox, locates the origins of these lines in Ezekiel 16’s praise of how God rescues Jerusalem, and in the story of Mary Magdalen’s conversion.2 However, Shakespeare and Herbert’s jocular and very specific contrast between different early modern fabrics does not appear in these biblical references. Taffeta is a plain-weave silk, three-ply cloth is of the highest quality, and arras is an embroidered or woven tapestry: these are all ornamental and fragile stuffs. Canvas comes from close-woven heavy-duty hemp fibres; kersey and russet are coarse-woven wool cloths, rejecting stains from maggots and dung.3 There is no record of Herbert reading or watching Shakespeare, but it seems likely he did so. Between the ages of eight and sixteen he lived in London as part of a lively literary family. He had a particular connection with the drama in the person of his brother, Sir Henry Herbert, who was Master of the Revels from 1623 onward. Many of Herbert’s poems (such as ‘The Holdfast’ and ‘Love’ 3) are structured as miniature dramas. The way in which both Shakespeare and Herbert reach for fabrics to show how their speakers find it impossible not to dress up their language—at the very moment in which they announce they are doing so—suggests that the poet is remembering Love's Labours Lost with amused affection.